


romancing the living

by Snickfic



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Turned Into a Ghost, F/M, Ghost continues romancing their old lover, Psychological Horror, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:34:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26472691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: “You killed me,” Edith said conversationally.
Relationships: Edith Cushing/Thomas Sharpe
Comments: 12
Kudos: 49
Collections: Jump Scare 2020





	romancing the living

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thatsparrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsparrow/gifts).



> Recip, I hope you enjoy this spin on your prompts. :)

By the end, the boundaries between living and dying and having died were all rather indistinct. Edith dozed somewhere in the center of them all, dreaming of impossible things: Lucille with butterfly wings for eyes, Thomas’s hand replaced with a drill bit that spun and spun. When she was nearer waking than sleeping, she knew what was happening to her. She saw it in Lucille’s sharp-eyed satisfaction, in the way Thomas’s eyes filled with regret whenever he looked at her.

It passed, as these things must pass for everyone someday. Edith died on an afternoon when the winter sun streamed thinly through tattered curtains. The transition was so gentle it took Edith some while to notice, to realize her limbs were no longer so heavy, her vision not so dim. She sat up carefully in bed and and looked through translucent fingers. 

“Well,” she said to a room inhabited only by a corpse, “that’s it, then.”

\--

She was meant to move on, she supposed. Her father was waiting for her somewhere, wasn’t he? Perhaps it was the niggling fear that he wasn’t that kept her in the house, rattling within its walls like the keys rattled on Lucille’s ring.

Thomas cried over her. He stroked her pale dead hand, and then he dragged her down to the basement, across tiles streaked with earth the color of blood. He held her at the edge of a crimson vat while she stood to one side and watched, her toes wet with mud that didn’t stain. Death brought its own boons, it seemed. 

Her eyes were closed. Thomas gripped her by the shoulders and kissed each eyelid while his grew damp with tears that Edith found herself already weary of. In a thick, wretched voice, he said, “I wish—”

But he did not go on to explain to the corpse what it was he wished. 

“You killed me,” Edith pointed out. “You can’t be that sorry.”

Thomas was flushed with the exertion of bringing her down here, his face lined with beads of sweat, but a shiver ran through him when she spoke. He glanced towards her, and for just a moment she thought—

Thomas peered right through her and shook his head. He tipped the body that had been Edith into the vat. She sank almost immediately into the crimson murk, leaving only large, viscous bubbles to mark her passing. 

“It’s quite morbid, really,” Edith said, watching the bubbles collapse one by one.

Thomas made no sign of hearing her this time, but nor did he linger. He dashed the tears from his eyes and strode back towards the stairs, and he didn’t look back.

\--

Edith’d thought herself alone before, but she was even lonelier now. The other ghosts never appeared to her anymore. All she had left was Thomas, who couldn’t hear her.

Sometimes Thomas fell asleep in his workshop, full of his broken machines and half-made toys. Edith contemplated him now, slumped over his work bench. His cheek was resting on a thin, finely-machined gear. Edith swept the curls back from his forehead and imagined the imprint the gear teeth would leave on his cheek.

“You killed me,” she said conversationally. Weren’t ghosts meant to be angry with their murderers? All Edith felt was a sort of vague curiosity, quickly dispelled by more interesting matters: Thomas’s breath condensing on a shard of mirror. The heat of his skin, which Edith could almost feel as she stroked his cheekbone. 

He awoke with a start. “Hello?”

There indeed was the print of the gear on his face, sharply outlined in white and red. Intrigued, Edith brushed her thumb across it. Thomas gave a sudden, violent shudder. “Why is it so damned cold,” he muttered, rubbing his arms.

“What are you working on?” Edith said. Those had been her favorite times, when Thomas sat her down on a stool and spoke of engineering tricks and mechanical things, his hands sketching out pictures as vivid as the one he described in words. He was beautiful, she’d thought, with his bright eyes and long, clever fingers. He was for her.

“I’m still your wife,” she told him now. “In spirit, anyway, and surely it’s the spirit of the law that binds us now.” She palmed his jaw, bristly and warm to the touch. 

Thomas shoved abruptly up and away from the bench. “Something to eat,” he muttered to himself, and hurried quickly away.

\--

The shadows were sharp on Thomas’s face, like a painting, chiaroscuro. He rubbed absently at his knuckles with his thumb. He did not see Edith. “I wish—”

“You _wish_ ,” Lucille said. She sat on the piano stool. Her fingers brushed over the keys.

“She didn’t deserve—”

“Neither did we.”

\--

Thomas was hers. That was the thought that built slowly in Edith’s mind, like the growth of a pearl. Other distractions—her still-fresh grief for her father, the gaping roof and open sky that she still took pains not to look at, Lucille—all these fell away as she focused on the simple fact that Thomas was hers.

She watched him at rest, dozing in a chair as moonlight shone through a window and turned his skin as pale as milk. When his sleep grew uneasy, she smoothed the furrow of his brow—or tried to, but it only deepened, as though it were one of Thomas’s own trenches dug into the earth.

She watched him at his work on his great invention, fussing with axels and gears, muttering to himself, staining his shirts with sweat. He brought great crimson gouts of mud up from the earth and swore over their contents.

“You’ll get there,” Edith said encouragingly. “You’ll figure it out. I know you will.”

Thomas hunched deeper into his coat. He did not look encouraged.

\--

“Out of the corner of my eye,” Thomas was saying. His fork lay abandoned by his plate. The shadows under his eyes brought out the blue in them. “I swear—”

“Are you losing your mind?” Lucille asked. “Like Mother?”

“I’m not losing my mind.”

\--

She watched him at his workbench as he blinked over blue prints and diagrams. She’d long ago lost interest in what the machine actually did; she cared only about Thomas’s fingers splayed across the fragile linen prints. She laid her hand on top of his, her fingers over his fingers.

They sunk through. Like boots in snow, like toes squelching in crimson mud, her fingers sank into his. Edith cried in alarm and pulled her hand sharply away. 

Thomas tumbled off his stool. Edith stared at her spread fingers and their reddish tint, which they’d never had before. Then she turned and saw Thomas on plank floor staring at his fingers just the same, though his were as pale as always except for a few smudges of ink. “Thomas?” Edith said.

He was breathing very hard, his breath gusting from his mouth in white clouds. He rubbed his hands carefully against each other, as if they hurt. Edith gave his shoulder a comforting squeeze. 

He jerked sharply away, but still he peered right through her as though she were so much mist, as though she weren’t there at all. It was so frustrating. He ought to look at _her_. He was _hers_. 

“Thomas,” someone said in a wild voice Edith didn’t recognize. Someone with blood-red hands clutched Thomas’s shoulder so tightly their nails bit through the cloth of his shirt and into his skin, digging, digging—

“Aaah,” Thomas cried, scrambling across the floor. He tore open his shirt to see four crescents in his shoulder, exactly the shape and color of Edith’s own fingernails. He stumbled to his feet and shoved the door open. He left her.

He _left_ her.

\--

Edith found herself in the work room. She didn’t remember where she’d been or how she’d come to be there. Her last memory was of Thomas, but thin afternoon light had still shone through the windows then, and now it was night.

Then, the work room had been filled with a comfortable kind of mess; now it was a shambles. The floor was littered with shattered glass, shredded blueprints, clumps of long-cold ash from the fireplace that Edith had never seen lit. The work bench was swept clean of all Thomas tools. All that remained was a long streak the color of old blood smeared across the wood.

“Thomas?” Edith called, turned around and then around again. “Thomas?”

\--

She found Thomas behind a locked door. She didn’t bother to notice what room it was. She didn’t even think to notice the door until after she’d already passed through it, and then she only glanced back, curious. She’d never walked through a door before.

Then her curiosity was gone, a fleeting thing, for Thomas was here. Thomas was crumpled under a blanket, fitfully sleeping. As Edith approached, he whimpered in alarm and squeezed his eyes even more tightly shut. Edith tried to brush his hair from his face, but her hand passed through the strands. Perhaps it always had. Perhaps her vision was no clearer than her form, anymore. “Thomas,” she tried.

He woke. She could tell it by the way he stilled, by how suddenly his breath stopped altogether.

“Thomas,” she tried again. “Please hear me. It’s your wife.”

There was a long pause. There was a heave of breath, when Thomas could no longer hold it. Finally, slowly, he opened his eyes. He looked blankly about him, his gaze flitting from shadow to shadow, seeing nothing at all.

Edith had seen ghosts when others couldn’t. The veil had always been thinner for her. She considered that image now: a veil, hiding, disguising. Then she stepped through it.

He stared, but now he stared at _her_. “Edith,” he said at last. His voice shook with relief.

Edith sat on the bed and pulled him into her arms. He shuddered so violently she worried he’d do himself an injury. She had to hold him quite tightly until the only sound in the room was the gasp of his breath. “It’s all right,” Edith said, stroking his hair. She felt the moment he began to cry—so happy to be reunited at last, for even death could not keep them apart. “It’s all right,” she assured him. “It’s all right.”


End file.
